{"title":"Coming into Visibility in the Indian Ocean","authors":"Yvette Christiansë","doi":"10.1080/03087298.2021.2145050","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This article discusses photographs in the Seychelles archive of Liberated Africans and in the Mauritian archive of identity documents for indentured Indians or Indian Immigrants. It considers the heterogeneity of their movement in two related contexts, when territorial boundaries and new definitions of labour and photography were drawn into assertions of state and colonial British authority. In the Seychelles, ‘passport-sized’ photographs were fixed and immobile in the Register of Liberated Africans. In Mauritius, identity photographs were attached to documents which individuals carried to prevent what we now call ‘identify theft’ and falsification. At issue is the differential mobility of the images and what they reveal about the circumstances in which ‘free’ people were trapped in and by a British colonial state bureaucracy determined to curb the ‘lawlessness’ of settlers, only to be drawn into an entangled complicity with those it sought to regulate. When European powers were consolidating territorial jurisdictions and boundaries by policing movement across the liquid domain of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, the ‘coming into visibility’ that photography afforded and demanded worked to differentially restrict the movements of racially marked people and to make movement itself the medium of State authority over local capitalists.","PeriodicalId":13024,"journal":{"name":"History of Photography","volume":"45 1","pages":"231 - 244"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2021-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"History of Photography","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2021.2145050","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ART","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
This article discusses photographs in the Seychelles archive of Liberated Africans and in the Mauritian archive of identity documents for indentured Indians or Indian Immigrants. It considers the heterogeneity of their movement in two related contexts, when territorial boundaries and new definitions of labour and photography were drawn into assertions of state and colonial British authority. In the Seychelles, ‘passport-sized’ photographs were fixed and immobile in the Register of Liberated Africans. In Mauritius, identity photographs were attached to documents which individuals carried to prevent what we now call ‘identify theft’ and falsification. At issue is the differential mobility of the images and what they reveal about the circumstances in which ‘free’ people were trapped in and by a British colonial state bureaucracy determined to curb the ‘lawlessness’ of settlers, only to be drawn into an entangled complicity with those it sought to regulate. When European powers were consolidating territorial jurisdictions and boundaries by policing movement across the liquid domain of the Indian and Atlantic oceans, the ‘coming into visibility’ that photography afforded and demanded worked to differentially restrict the movements of racially marked people and to make movement itself the medium of State authority over local capitalists.
期刊介绍:
History of Photography is an international quarterly devoted to the history, practice and theory of photography. It intends to address all aspects of the medium, treating the processes, circulation, functions, and reception of photography in all its aspects, including documentary, popular and polemical work as well as fine art photography. The goal of the journal is to be inclusive and interdisciplinary in nature, welcoming all scholarly approaches, whether archival, historical, art historical, anthropological, sociological or theoretical. It is intended also to embrace world photography, ranging from Europe and the Americas to the Far East.